Dzo’s truck rolled toward them and stopped with a lurch. The two of them pulled their clothes on and jumped in the back, but Powell never stopped telling his story.

“There have been wolves like ours in Europe for thousands of years. The old stories suggest they had something called a wolf strap—a belt, or a girdle, and when they put it on they would take the shape of wolves. I wasted a lot of time researching that, trying to find if such a thing existed. Maybe, I thought, the strap actually prevented the change. Maybe there was a way to make myself normal. No dice, I’m afraid. It has to be a myth. The wolves couldn’t live in normal human society any more than you or I can. They killed people. Maybe they thought they were supposed to—some of the stories are pretty vicious. Sometimes they almost overran the human population. In Germany and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were thousands—tens of thousands—of werewolves burned at the stake or hanged or tortured to death. Traditionally they were buried with their heads cut off and their hearts impaled by a silver cross. The burning and hanging wouldn’t have killed them permanently. As soon as the moon rose their bodies would try to change, even inside their coffins. Those silver crosses would have finished them off. But not instantaneously.”

Chey squinted very hard, trying not to think about what that meant.

“By 1800 our kind of wolves were extinct, or so it was commonly believed. I’d read stories about men who could turn into wolves as a child. I’d read all the fairytales. By my day they were nothing but old silly stories. Now I know the wolves never went away—they just went into hiding. Lucie in her cage was not the only one. I’ve met others in my time, old beasts, legendary monsters. If they’re careful enough they get away with it, and these old European families had learned to be very, very careful.

“They kept me locked in the cage for a week, even as my body changed and changed again. They were stronger than me, what could I do? You’ve seen for yourself what the curse does for us, even in human form. They fed me raw meat and filthy water until I was crazy myself. A patrol came around looking for me and my pals. We’d been gone so long I assumed the front had moved on without us and that they’d marked us off as missing, assumed dead. When I heard soldiers moving around the half-ruined castle I thought maybe I was going to be rescued. I didn’t even consider what that would mean. Lucie held her hand over my mouth when I started to scream. I tried to bite and even chew through her fingers but she didn’t even yelp. Eventually the soldiers left.

“Hatred is a funny thing. It’s a high-minded principle in its way—as ugly as it might be it’s an abstract, a refined feeling. As such it can’t last unless you feed it constantly. It’s tough to keep it hot in your heart when you’re faced with the truly mundane. I had realities I had to confront that got in the way of hating my captors. I wanted cooked food. I wanted to shave. I wanted to wash my clothing. All these things I could do, they said, but first I had to behave myself. Eventually I relented. I swore up and down I’d be good. They let me out of the cage, at first only when my wolf was on me. Later I was allowed to move around the castle, though they watched me. Eventually they began to trust me.”

“You mentioned they were looking for a mate.”

Powell actually turned red. “There was that, yes. Having two beautiful women as my captors probably didn’t hurt matters. Had they been men I might have fought a little harder.”

“Did you have sex with them?” she asked.

“My God that sounds ugly when you say it like that,” he said.

Chey just watched his face. She took some real delight in his squirming.

He looked away and blew air out of his mouth. He shifted on the truck bed as if his legs were falling asleep. Finally he looked straight up—then turned his frozen eyes on her. “They were voracious. But I found it within myself to satisfy them. There were endless fights and slow-burning jealousies and quite a bit of treachery. But we made love, yes. Almost constantly. Sometimes as humans and sometime as wolves. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Just trying to keep you honest,” Chey said, a laugh in her voice.

He changed the subject quickly. “After the war ended the Baroness was at least sane enough to realize we couldn’t roam the countryside by moonlight anymore. We shared the cage when we were wolves and lived like humans when the moon was down, pretending to be a quietly decaying, formerly aristocratic French family. The local villagers supplied us with our few needs and asked few questions. If anyone noticed my accent was a bit off when I spoke, they just assumed I was a deserter from the war, which was true enough.

“We received only vague recollections of the terror and anger our wolves felt locked away like that. In dreams I would catch glimpses of our panic, though, and even in my quietest moments I felt claustrophobic and anxious. I was going insane, just as Lucie had over the decades. I didn’t want to break down completely the way she had. I told them I wanted to leave. To come back to Canada, my homeland, and try to create some kind of life. There were real wolves there, I told them, there were places we could be free. The Baroness might have come with me but Lucie took it worse than I expected. She tried to kill me. I barely got away—and even then she tracked me. For years she followed me, sticking close to my shadow, waiting for me to slip up.”

“Jesus,” Chey said. “What happened?”

“Like I said,” Powell told her, “hate’s difficult to maintain. Even for crazy people.”